Tag Archives: Bruce-Sterling

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Bruce Sterling on atemporality

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I’d be remiss in my fanboy duties if I didn’t repost this video of a keynote speech from Bruce Sterling at last week’s Transmediale Futurity Now! conference in Berlin.

Appropriately enough for a conference in Berlin, a city where history lays heavily in layers of physical and psychological flotsam and jetsam, Chairman Bruce is talking about atemporality – that curious and disorientating sense that modern media gives us of all times being somehow equal.

Atemporality is “a calm, pragmatic [and] serene skepticism about the historical narrative”; it’s “a philosophy of history with a built-in expiry date”; it’s the end of post-modernism, and the end of The End Of History. But enough with the sound-bite pull-quotes – it’s only 25 minutes long, so settle down comfortably and get your mind expanded.

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Achieving longevity

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moai_profileThere always seems to be some intriguing news on progress in extending lifespans, or achieving what Aubrey De Grey calls engineered negligible senescence. From Physorg we have news that a compound called rapamycin, first discovered on Easter Island, can increase the lifespans of laboratory mice:

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and two collaborating centers reported that the Easter Island compound – called “rapamycin” after the island’s Polynesian name, Rapa Nui – extended the expected lifespan of middle-aged mice by 28 percent to 38 percent. In human terms, this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life if cancer and heart disease were both cured and prevented.

Protein folding in certain species of bats has been found to lead to an increase in their lifespans:

Asish and colleagues made their discovery by extracting proteins from the livers of two long-lived bat species (Tadarida brasiliensis and Myotis velifer) and young adult mice and exposed them to chemicals known to cause protein misfolding. After examining the proteins, the scientists found that the bat proteins exhibited less damage than those of the mice, indicating that bats have a mechanism for maintaining proper structure under extreme stress.

And finally the curious case of Brooke Greenberg: who is the size of an infant, with the mental capacity of a toddler, but turned 16 in January:

In a recent paper for the journal “Mechanisms of Ageing and Development,” Walker and his co-authors, who include Pakula and All Children’s Hospital (St. Petersburg, Fla.) geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke’s aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.

“There’ve been very minimal changes in Brooke’s brain,” Walker said. “Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected.”

A substantial increase in human lifespans would be a huge, world-changing, medical and technological achievement, but could well lead to many social problems. An excellent exploration of the effects of longevity is Bruce Sterling‘s sublime Holy Fire.

[from Physorg and abcnews][image from anoldent on flickr]

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RepRap creates circuits

just-finishedA moment of history. The RepRap project has created circuits for the first time:

Ed and I have a final-year student – Rhys Jones – who’s working on RepRap for his MEng research project. He’s been taking the old idea of depositing metal in channels and an observation of Forrest’s and Nophead’s (that you don’t need a low-melting-point alloy because the specific heat of metals is so low that they shouldn’t melt the plastic anyway).

Also worth a look: Bruce Sterling points to Darwinian Marxism as a means of ensuring the proletariat gain possession of the means of production sans revolution.

[via the Yorkshire Ranter][image from the Reprap blog]

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Bruce Sterling: “People don’t pay attention to novels”

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The BBC has an interview with Bruce Sterling and, despite being a man with a new book to plug (which I’m about 0.25 of the way through reading, incidentally), he doesn’t have much faith in the power of science fiction novels to change the world, despite their greater modern relevance:

“People don’t pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse.

“You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary.”

[snip]

Science fiction, he says, has as much relevance in today’s world of seemingly relentless scientific endeavour across many different fields as it did in the past when the perception of the pace of change was arguably slower.

He says: “Science fiction writers are not suffering from the pace of development. We’re suffering much less than stockbrokers and financiers from that pace of change.”

That makes a certain amount of sense; after all, an sf writer is trying to steer his imagination through the currents of the near future, while a stockbroker is trying to steer an intangible and evaporating block of digital money that in many respects doesn’t really exist at all… I know which job I’d rather have. 😉

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Bruce Sterling sideswipes AI evangelism

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Bruce Sterling’s keynote speech at the Webstock conference in New Zealand last month contained the usual high concentration of non-fic eyeball kicks, and is well worth a read if you’re at all interested in the culture of the web, modern economics and the near future.

As usual, there are loads of provocative little asides nestled in the narrative, and I was particularly taken by this backhander to the face of artificial intelligence advocates:

I really think it’s the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is “intelligence.” That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It’s code being executed. It’s a powerful thing, it’s a beautiful thing, but to call that “intelligence” is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.

There’s something sad and pathetic about it, like a lonely old woman whose only friends are her cats. “I had to leave my 14 million dollars to Fluffy because he loves me more than all those poor kids down at the hospital.”

This stuff we call “collective intelligence” has tremendous potential, but it’s not our friend — any more than the invisible hand of the narcotics market is our friend.

Zing! I think we can be certain that Sterling doesn’t subscribe to any of the three schools of Singularitarianism.